Quote

Just don't pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don't. Stay open to them. It's teatime and all the dolls are at the table. Listen. It's that simple.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Open
Simple
Dolls
Character
Pretend
Writing
Table
Tables
Characters
Listen
Stay

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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You fall so deeply in love with your grandbaby. It's so so so much easier than being a parent, because you really don't have much responsibility. And just when you are at the end of your rope with exhaustion, the parents take the baby away. So it's the best of both worlds.
Anne Lamott
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Expectations are resentment waiting to happen.
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Everybody thinks their opinion is the right one. If they didn't, they would get a new one.
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I feel incredibly successful. I make a living as a writer and am able to help support a big family, my church, my bleeding-heart causes.
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Listen to your broccoli and it will tell you how to eat it.
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I kept asking God for help, and after a while I realized something -- that Josh was not enjoying this either. He was just trying to take care of himself, and I made the radical decision to let him off the hook.
Anne Lamott
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Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.
Anne Lamott
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What’s the difference between you and God? God never thinks he’s you.
Anne Lamott
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I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I'd remember that wonderful line of Blake's- that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love- and I would take a long deep breath and force these words out of my strangulated throat: Thank you.
Anne Lamott
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Sometimes I think God loves the ones who most desperately ache and are most desperately lost - his or her wildest, most messed-up children - the way you'd ache and love a screwed-up rebel daughter in juvenile hall.
Anne Lamott
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I just can't get over how much babies cry. I really had no idea what I was getting into. To tell you the truth, I thought it would be more like getting a cat.
Anne Lamott
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Sometimes Heaven is just a new pair of glasses.
Anne Lamott
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I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good at it.
Anne Lamott
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We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.
Anne Lamott
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Some people won't go the extra mile, and then on their birthday, when no one makes a fuss, they feel neglected and bitter.
Anne Lamott
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But you don't always get what you want,you get what you get
Anne Lamott
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Getting into a new relationship is like pouring Miracle-Gro on your character defects.
Anne Lamott
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I find most famous Christians to be full of themselves and of prejudice and self-loathing, masquerading as devout religious belief. I find all fundamentalism to be terrifying and very destructive.
Anne Lamott
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There is ecstasy in paying attention.
Anne Lamott
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There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness.
Anne Lamott